This One Thing Might be the Missing Link in Your Training!
Pssst it's Recovery....
Improving my recovery habits dramatically improved my performance this season, this is how you can implement my learnings to train smart and perform better!
If you’ve read my other articles you probably know I’m very lucky and get coached by someone who really knows his craft! I’ve learned a tonne from him but learning to recover well is by far and away the biggest lesson I’ve learned this season.
I started this journey when I ordered a whoop 3 years ago a now and started getting specific about tracking my habits, trust me, if you haven’t already you’re gonna want to try Whoop, it’s a game changer if you face the facts it’s putting in front of you.
Gadgets aside, it was my first window into what I was doing to help and more often than not, hinder my recovery. When Dan my coach started helping me train for this season, we really dropped back my training hours and focussed on maximising my recovery. It’s the age old quality vs quantity dichotomy, I was too focussed on quantity and screwed up the quality by recovering so poorly.
I’m hopefully going to save you some of the fatigue, injury and general frustration that getting your recovery wrong can bring. Here are some of my learnings so you don’t have to learn the hard way. Let’s get into it!
Sleep yourself fit
I am beyond happy that Matthew Walker and other highly regarded scientists have made sleep sexy again, sleep is your number 1 recovery tool, don’t believe me? Just ask the Norwegians!
As you can imagine and have probably experienced yourself, training loads higher than 7 hours a week can lead to a struggle to fit everything into your life. We only have so much time in the day and many of us have busy full time jobs that don’t offer a great deal of flexibility. This can often lead to sacrificing your sleep hours in order to fit in training. Unfortunately, if you prioritise training over your sleep you are pretty much wasting that session to a degree, the old adage of “you don’t get stronger in the gym, you get stronger after” is incredibly relevant here.
Sleep is the best way our bodies have developed to recover from life stressors and yes, regardless of how it makes you feel psychologically, training for your favourite sport is still a stressor. This means your training will increase your sleep need.
So I’m afraid that if you are already missing your minimum standards (7-9 hours) and then adding training load, you’re accumulating quite a bit of sleep debt. Every time you trade an hour of sleep for an hour of training you are effectively reducing that sessions effectiveness by much more than if you reversed that trade.
Conversely if you trade an hour of training for an hour sleep the return is not 1:1, that additional sleep will act like compound interest on your performance. The reason for this is that sleep debt will not just affect your recovery from todays session, it will reduce your ability to perform tomorrow. As a result you may need to take what would otherwise be an unnecessary rest day to recover fully from accumulating load without appropriate recovery.
I hope what you takeaway from this, is that sleep is absolutely key to performance, but not just performance in sport, it will keep you healthy, mentally sharp and generally improve your mood. It really is a panacea when it comes to getting the most out of ourselves!
Work in cycles
This is one from the school of periodisation, it ties back heavily to what we spoke about with sleep. You can’t go full gas all the time without building up cumulative fatigue and this translates into higher recovery needs, if you don’t meet those needs you will likely be missing out on big gains that backing off training a little would have given you.
I know it sounds a little counterintuitive that reducing your training load every now and then will result in better fitness built, however, this is where periodisation comes into play.
Periodisation is the practice of balancing stress with rest, a common cycle athletes & coaches use is the classic; Block Periodisation. It’s more commonly known as 3 weeks build 1 week recover, the recovery week isn’t a week off like it may appear, it’s actually just a week where you reduce training load by 20 - 30 % to allow a well adapted athlete time to bounce back.
In a recovery week you generally spend most of your time in Z2 and easy effort aerobic exercise, you may have a pickup or two here or there but you will primarily focus on keeping things ticking over to avoid detraining or feeling sluggish.
Block Periodisation (the method we are talking about here) has been consistently shown to offer improved VO2max adaptations and increased injury / illness prevention compared to other periodisation models. Effectively, adding this type of mesocycle breakdown to your training is a no brainer if you’re trying to improve your recovery!
Hopefully you can see the value in adding reduced training load into your training cycles, it’s often the hardest sell to most athletes because we want to train more and associate more training with improved fitness! However, we do often neglect lighter weeks where the speed and strength are actually built.
Trust me, from personal experience reducing your training load might be the rock where some of those gains are hidden!
Nutrition
Before we get started on food, let me just say I’m not a qualified sports nutritionist or any type of nutritionist (yet!), so I’m not gonna dig into anything other than my own experience with nutrition. But what we’re talking about here primarily is experimentation.
Nutrition is so individual, not just in the race or during training but all your nutrition around the races and sessions. What’s really cool to see are companies and studies focussing on personalised nutritional needs, the more we know the more we seem to understand that there is no “perfect diet” that can be applied en mass.
The main thing to focus on when we’re talking about recovery is both timing and content. Again, it’s really worth emphasising that your mileage will vary! Ideally you want to split your fuelling in 3; before, during and after. All three of these aspects will aid your recovery, if you fail to fuel well before you will be playing catchup during and if you fail to fuel during you risk bonking which will likely wipe you out for the rest of the day. Finally, if you fail to fuel post session or race you risk losing those hard won adaptations not to mention feeling quite rubbish for the rest of the day too.
You want to focus on dialling in your ratios of the big 3; carbs, fat, protein. As a bit of a rule of thumb, carbs & fat are most import before you train or race, crabs are the name of the game during your race / session. And finally, carbs, fat but most importantly protein should be your focus post race / session.
How do I know how much and when? Great question and the answer is annoyingly; it depends… You really need to be your own best scientist on this or better yet, consult a sports nutritionist who is reputable such as Taryn @ dietitianapproved.
The way I personally approach this, I ask a lot of questions, listen to a bunch of podcasts and read plenty around nutrition. Then, I apply what I’ve understood and learned to myself to see if it works the way it’s supposed to according to those people who know much more than me. My barometer for success is that I feel better after training than I did before, if I feel sluggish & tired or bloated and overly full after a session I generally consider the experiment a failure and I need to make some tweaks.
It’s also the same for assessing information, if someone champions a vegan / keto / HFLC diet I generally take their advice with a pinch of salt. Every time I have tried a specific school of eating purely in pursuit of performance it pretty much never works. I personally follow a plant-based diet for my own ethical reasons around animal welfare, but I would never recommend it as a panacea of sports performance, it’s actually bloody hard to be a long distance Triathlete who eats only plants, turns out plants aren’t very calorie dense and you just have to eat so much more than most other people, it gets a bit grim at times.
I realise this all quite vague, but some advice you can take with you is to make small tweaks and see how you feel. Small changes well recorded and associated with your training numbers and RPE will tell you most of what you need to know. It’s also not too complicated to get the basics right, do these things and you’ll be well on your way to feeling great & recovering well:
Lots of fruit and veg - Aim for 5 - 10 portions a day.
Protein intake - Starting at 1.2G per KG of bodyweight per day, remember to spread it out!
Carbs from whole food sources like oats, barley, legumes & pulses.
Fats from good sources like avocado, olives & Olive oil, flax seeds, chia seeds.
Fuel for recovery within 30 minutes of a training session finishing.
Fuel well on the session, aiming to start at 60g of carbs per hour and seeing what works best for you. You may need less & you may need more but it will also change over time.
Hydrate well, not just water but topping up on good salts too.
As I say, this is just a starting point from which you should flex up and down, figure out the best foods for you based on context of before / during / after. It takes time to get food right, you can speed it up with help from a sport dietitian, however, not all of us are lucky enough to be able to have those services on hand. So, get used to understanding what you need, after all, even with the best help in the world you still need to understand what works best for you!
I hope this post has inspired you to double down on your recovery practices, even if you just go to bed earlier as a result of reading this article I will consider that a win! Don’t leave those gains on the table that can be created just by dialling in your 3 pillars of recovery.
If you think someone else could benefit from this article, please share it around!